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Just realized I was over-torquing stems for years
A customer brought back a bike with a cracked steerer tube last month and said he'd never touched it. I had been cranking stems to 8 Nm thinking tighter was safer, but that's way over the 5 Nm limit for carbon. Anyone else ever get a wake-up call from a failure that made you check your torque specs again?
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jones.anna19d ago
Yeah you been there too @olivia_harris19? I did the exact same mistake on my own fork last year, torqued it to 8 Nm for years thinking more is better. No cracks showed up until I swapped stems and saw this tiny hairline right at the top of the steerer tube. Scary stuff, now I check every build with a torque wrench twice.
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olivia_harris1920d ago
Did you check the steerer for any hairline cracks after the stem was loosened? Carbon can fail in ways you can't see with the naked eye, so that's a scary thing to miss. Just curious if there were any signs before it broke completely.
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